OCCASIONAL OFFICES

One of the perhaps unexpected privileges of parish ministry is taking funerals for people whom you would have liked to have known. As Anglican clergy we are available to take the funerals of anyone who lived in our parish, whether or not they came to church. This can be a challenge. In some churches where the geographical parish is very small the funerals tend to be merely for churchgoers, in which case the job is easy (though sometimes not, because there is such a thing as knowing too much about someone), but for most of us there are a fair number for people we don't know at all. Now, I regularly hear about regrettable occasions where clergy have clearly failed to do their homework for some reason, but generally I think we all try to do a decent job.You just have to find out about the person, and use what you find out to preach the gospel of the resurrection and make what you say appropriate and personal. Connecting with people's emotional state, and holding out the prospect of the life to come seems fairly basic. Sometimes, though, in doing one's research, one realises that one would really have liked to have known the deceased.

Recently I did a funeral for an old gentleman who had been a doctor, according to the undertaker. Well, when I talked to his son it turned out that the old gent was a very distinguished epidemiologist. He had also served in the Royal Navy, and been surgeon to the fleet at the time of one of the Icelandic Cod Wars. Then in later life he worked for the EEC in Luxembourg, in the nuclear power inspectorate, which is where he was at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. He clearly also enjoyed his retirement in southern Spain. His son remarked that he had studied epidemics all his life but never really saw a big one, and just when his knowledge might have been useful, he couldn't contribute. His funeral was marked by a bizarre choice of music, "We gotta get out of this place" by the Animals, which he had apparently sung in his care home (though his son never realised he knew it). Otherwise the music was very normal and dignified, but we did smile.

More recently still, I took the funeral of an old lady who had been in the nursing home just round the corner, which (in normal times) I visit every week. She had been an occasional attender at my services there when she first moved in, but I'd never really got to know her. It turns out that this was a real missed opportunity, since she had been Margaret Thatcher's personal secretary throughout the Downing Street years. Prior to working for Mrs Thatcher she had done the same job for Airey Neave, until he was murdered by the IRA. Apparently she was there in the Downing Street flat when Mrs Thatcher fell (incidentally, isn't it interesting that the US President has "the Residence" while our PM has a flat) and went everywhere with her. No-one at the nursing home had the slightest idea of any of this, as far as I could see, presumably because the old lady's rather modest family didn't make a song and dance about it, in a rather British understated way. It made me at once proud and regretful, as that old lady should have had a bigger funeral than she did, though of course no-one can have a big funeral at the moment, thanks to the virus.  

We always try to help out our brethren with bigger parishes, and so do funerals from across parish boundaries when asked, but sometimes the funeral directors take the mickey and just phone up seemingly at random. The very first funeral I did in London was like that, on my first week in the parish, when I didn't yet know the geography; an undertaker phoned up and asked whether I would take this funeral, of a lady from such-and-such flats. I, eager to please, and knowing I had lots of flats in the parish, said yes and wrote down the unfamiliar address. It turned out to be just off Portobello Road, not that far away, but not my parish, not even my deanery, not even, in fact, my archdeaconry or episcopal area. In secular terms, not even the same borough. I never did get to the bottom of why that had come my way.

I was, though, pretty green in my first week in London, because I was also a victim of what was known as "the funeral scam". A person rang the doorbell, claiming to be related to one of my church officers (whose name they had in fact just read off a notice in the church porch) but unable to get in touch with them for some reason. They had just heard, they said, of the death of their mother, and needed to get back to somewhere in the north to arrange the funeral. I wrote all this down, and was, of course, hugely sympathetic and gave them some money to get them back there. My church officer would pay me back, they said. Of course, they were not related, and I never saw my money again. An email the next week revealed that this scam was being used regularly on London clergy. I at least consoled myself that I was the innocent country boy, learning the ways of the big black smoke; others had less excuse.